Three times Gaila and T'Pring met, and what happened after
by ShiftingSideways
Summary: Three times Gaila and T'Pring met, and (some of) what happened after. T'Pring/Gaila. Also contains background T'Pring/Stonn, massive angst, and perhaps slightly more Vulcan vocabulary than strictly necessary.


Author's note:

Written as a last-minute pinch hit for the lovely tristesses in the Rare Pair Fest-I couldn't resist their prompt!

* * *

The first time they met was at a conference hosted by the Orion Institute of Cosmology.

T'Pring had never been offworld before, but when the opportunity had presented itself, it would have been entirely illogical not to accept. The Orion Institute was one of the foremost schools of Cosmology in the quadrant, and the faculty was known for being more open to new ideas than the Vulcan science academy. This might be her only chance to discuss the logical merits of some of the more innovative ideas she had come to believe showed the most possibility.

Still, it was a strange experience. Certainly, she had met offworlders before—one could not be a student of the Vulcan Science Academy and avoid it. But still, those were offworlders who had willingly come to Vulcan to be a part of the most conservative of all Vulcan institutions, even if they did not always show appropriate restraint. Here, though, it was different.

Here, _she_ was the offworlder. Here, _she_ was the one running into unexpected and not entirely welcome local customs and mannerisms.

In retrospect, the humans and Andorians and Bolians she had worked alongside at the academy were models of proper Vulcan restraint. Here, she had to keep her mental shields at maximum at all times, in case anyone either accidentally jostled her—or decided to emphasize a point with physical contact, as had already happened several times. The first time _that_ had happened, it had taken every ounce of the high level of control she prided herself on to avoid showing her utter shock at such a breach of personal space. The instigator hadn't noticed.

Still, not all of the cultural barriers involved physical contact. In fact, the one she was only now becoming aware of involved nothing more than eye contact.

T'Pring hadn't even realized she had a taboo against excessive eye contact. Indeed, many races seemed to find standard Vulcan levels uncomfortable. However, the intensity with which this particular Orion woman was staring at her was certainly uncomfortable, approaching disconcerting.

"May I assist you?"

Perhaps simply implying that the attention had been noticed would be enough to dissuade it.

Unfortunately, that appeared not to be the case.

The red-haired Orion, whose nameplate identified her only as Gaila, smiled—that much she might have been used to, but why was she tilting her head so far to the side?

"Ah, I suppose I was staring. Sorry about that. I was just…curious, I guess. Cultural exchange may be one of the goals of the conference, but I was still being impolitely curious." She glanced away as if to make up for her earlier staring.

T'Pring's eyebrows drew ever so slightly together.

"There is something about me that incites your curiosity?"

As far as she was aware, she was a fairly average attendee, at least visibly—approximately 26.7 percent of the attendees were Vulcans, and about 47 percent of those were women.

The woman's lips twitched slightly. "Well, I'd never met an unbonded Vulcan before."

Now that _was _unexpected, and rather invasive, 'cultural exchange' or no. T'Pring raised an eyebrow.

"How are you aware of my bonded status?"

The woman shrugged. "You smell different."

Facinating. Invasive, but fascinating.

Briefly, T'Pring weighed the pros and cons of continuing the conversation versus walking away, decided that curiosity outweighed admittedly culture-bound ideal of privacy, at least provisionally, and elected to continue the conversation.

"How is your olfactory system able to determine the presence or absence of a purely mental construct?"

The Orion made an odd sound through her nasal passages—was that meant to be relevant?—and then smoothed her features into something like scientific detachment.

"Well, I can't smell telepathy, no. But I couldn't classify your bonds as 'purely' mental, since there's a pretty clear sexual component."

That one took nearly as much control as physical contact, but the woman continued.

"What I _can_ smell is…perhaps 'availability' would be the best way to put it? Those of you who are already partnered smell one way, but you smell completely different."

"If, as you have said, I am the first unbonded Vulcan you have come across, how can you extrapolate from a single data point?"

Gaila grinned in what T'Pring tentatively identified as triumph. "Well, you did just confirm that I was right. But in answer to your question: I extrapolated from data points other than Vulcan."

T'Pring's eyebrows drew together again. "Please elaborate."

Gaila shrugged. "It's a basic sense for me. I know what it smells like for Orions, for humans, for Tellerites, for Andorians, even for Klingons. It's not hard to tell—it's not completely different for each species."

"But if you are not familiar with Vulcan biology—"

Gaila didn't give her a chance to finish. With a slightly explosive breath, she ran her hand through her red hair. "Look," she said. "Look at me. Am I male or female?"

T'Pring blinked. "Female."

"How can you tell? Have you studied Orion anatomy?"

"I have not."

"Then how can you be sure?"

T'Pring was silent for a moment. "Because your similarities to other females are strong enough to warrant the assumption. I see."

Gaila nodded. "And I'm assuming that you didn't have to run that comparison deliberately, either. It's all subconscious."

T'Pring shook her head slightly. "Vulcans do not possess what you would consider a 'subconscious'. We are always aware of the actions of our minds. However," she conceded, "the process was…automatic."

"Huh," said Gaila. "Interesting." She tilted her head again. "So…unbonded Vulcan. I thought that didn't happen."

Invasive again. But Gaila had already done her part to promote intercultural exchange.

"I was bonded in childhood, as per Vulcan custom," she allowed. "However, we proved incompatible when he chose Star Fleet over the Vulcan Science Academy, and we elected to dissolve the bond."

Gaila nodded. "Fair enough. Though I can't blame him for choosing Star Fleet, as I've chosen it myself."

T'Pring glanced at her in surprise. "You are in Star Fleet?"

Gaila smiled, and tugged at the collar of her civilian shirt where her rank pips would have been. "Cadet. I'm about to start my fourth year at Starfleet Academy."

"Do you wish to become a science officer?"

"Command track, actually," she said with a wistful smile. "Now _that_—" she gestured with a wide arc that encompassed the whole hall, and somehow reminded T'Pring of the carnivorous grace of a _le-matya_—"was a hard choice. I wish I could still be a fuller part of all this."

T'Pring's eyebrows drew together again. "If you wish it, then why do you not abandon the command track for a more scientific calling?"

Gaila laughed, but the sound was very different from before.

"I'm afraid I can't distill months' worth of contemplation into a single response. You'll just have to trust that I made the right decision." T'Pring's eyebrows hardly knew what to do with themselves. "But still, I'm not going to get over my inordinate love of space-time cosmology."

Now that was familiar ground. "Are you familiar with T'Grei's theory of Galactic Ecology…?"

* * *

The second time they met was a year and a lifetime later.

The year was a Federation Standard one, set to the cycle of Earth's path around Sol.

The lifetime was because everything was divided into Before and After.

Later, they would name it the _Va'Pak_—_The Immeasurable Loss—_but right now it was nothing but terrible burning emptiness that threatened to overcome her every time she tried to think.

She should not be here, why was she here, why had she not perished with the rest…

She had been in a shuttle. In a shuttle, studying gravitational phenomena in Vulcan's sun. Research. Only research. They had been almost home—

_Home, home, home…_

—almost home when the attack started.

No one had recognized the ship, which was odd enough, but the weapon…

T'Pring had been assigned to the secondary sensor station, which she had attuned to the space/time variables her research focused on. Being unable to do anything else, she scanned the ship, suppressing her slowly-growing fear under the possibility, however slight, that she might be able to find something of value.

What she _did_ find made her blink. The weapon was a standard energy weapon—the only unusual thing about it was its sheer _size_—but the ship itself was another matter.

Tachyons, gravitons, chronoton particles…under the watchful false-color eye of her scanners, the ship was a swirling rainbow sandstorm of everything that could interfere with time, space, and the nature of the universe.

"Professor—" she tried, but before she could get her attention, the shuttle rocked dangerously.

Outside, the all-too-few ships finally mustered by Vulcan's planetary defense were swirling around the tentacle-like maw of the ship. For the first time, T'Pring understood how large the ship truly was—at least three times the size of the Constitution-class starship she'd been using for reference.

"Engines are down," said the student shuttle's engineer. "Life support relegated to emergency batteries."

"Are they targeting us?" asked the shuttle commander, who was doubling as the pilot.

"Negative. That appeared to be missed shot from the battle. Shall I activate the distress beacon?"

"That could make us a target—"

The shuttle shuddered again.

"That appeared to be a deliberate shot."

T'Pring turned back to her sensor bank. Disarming the fear of personal death was an early lesson, easily learned. If she was to die today, she would learn everything she could about the last mystery she had been presented.

She pushed aside the question _For what purpose?_ Her death was not guaranteed, after all.

Fear of her own death was easy to suppress. Fear for those she cherished was not.

The laser looked like it could not be far from ShiKahr.

Splitting her attention, T'Pring focused half her mind on cataloguing the data she was collecting, noting the jarring clash of anomalies even amid the impossibility of the ship's very existence, while the other half reached across space through the mental links she shared.

Her bondmate…she and Stonn had bonded barely half a year ago, and she was too far away for words to pass through the link, but she could sense his presence.

"…life support systems failing…"

Turning her attention to the other links she shared, she found her mother, and then her father, while still using the other half of her mind to analyze the strange readings from the alien ship.

Wait…perhaps…

But before she could complete the thought, a shape leapt into existence on the viewscreen.

A starship.

"Activating distress bea—"

The world dissolved around her.

Only her Vulcan reflexes kept her from hitting the ground as she rematerialized without a bench under her.

"Gotcha," said the transporter's operator.

"I require access to this ship's sensors," said T'Pring without preamble.

"You're welcome," said the green-skinned officer lightly. "What for?"

"I may have seen something about the ship—"

The woman's eyes widened. "Barton," she said to her uniformed companion. "You got this station?"

He gave her an odd look, but nodded. "I can cover it here."

"Thanks!"

The Orion turned back to T'Pring and made as if to grab her arm before turning the motion into a broad gesture. "Come on, then." She broke into a run, which T'Pring easily matched. "What little we've got on this ship is both enigmatic and bad, so if you've got anything, they'll want to know."

She took an unexpected corner, then pulled up short and ushered T'Pring into the controlled chaos of what must be an astrophysics lab.

"Hey!" she called to no one in particular. "One of the Vulcans we pulled off the ship is here to help. T'Pring's an expert in space/time cosmology, so—"

It was only then that T'Pring recognized the Orion as Gaila, but before she could wonder about it, one of the scientists grabbed her arm—she felt his panic like a jolt of electricity before she could jam her shields into place—and pulled her to a station.

"If you can make sense of these readings," he said, "I don't care who you are."

Tapping the screen, she adjusted the computer the readings she'd seen just before beam out.

The man frowned and leaned too close over her shoulder.

"Is that…"

T'Pring's lips tightened. "It appears to be."

"But…carrying that much Decalithium is _suicide!_"

"What?" said Gaila, who had been about to leave. "Did you say—"

"It appears to have been modified from its base form, but yes. They appear to be carrying almost a cubic meter of Decalithium."

T'Pring glanced up at the Orion woman, and the look of horror on her face showed that she understood.

Gaila met her eyes for an instant, and then spun away.

"Captain!" she shouted, punching the wall unit, "The enemy ship is—"

The artificial gravity lost its center, and the lights went utterly dark before switching to the dim reddish illumination of the emergency lights.

"What's happening?" someone shouted.

"I can't tell!" cried someone else. "Can't someone—"

"Working on it!"

One of the wall screens flickered to life, and T'Pring felt the sudden illogical urge to wish that it hadn't.

Across the screen drifted a ripped-off piece of starship—an engineering section with nacelles, marked _Farragut._

There was a moment of stunned silence.

"But…" said someone. "…aren't we _on_ the Farragut?"

"Yes." That was Gaila.

"Oh god."

The ship—or what was left of it—shook again, and the view on the screen skewed wildly.

"And one with engineering experience! Focus on reinforcing the structural and emergency forcefields! We need as many as possible!"

Closing her eyes, T'Pring ignored the Orion's voice and threw her mind outward again.

_Stonn?_

They were still too far for words—

She shouldn't have been able to, but for a split instant, she saw what he saw.

_The orange-white laser struck the ground outside ShiKahr, ripping through the vivid red-gold desert she/he remembered from his/her Kahs-Wan so many years ago, throwing up rings of dust and debris, darkening the sky so that even the half-full face of Vulcan's sister planet T'Rukh was barely visible._

_Then the laser stopped._

_For a precious moment, all was quiet. Then a tiny, insignificant dot became visible as it fell from the endless red sky._

_T'Pring's half of their mind reacted with unsuppressed horror._

_Stonn's half was only confused._

_The tiny dot slipped into the crater._

_No…_

_The word itself might have slipped across the void between them, but that was all._

_There was a deep, groaning rumble, and then the shockwave hit._

_The ground shook under him/her, as if T'Khasi herself trembled in fear, and her/his feet slipped out from under her—_

The impact threw her back into her own body as the bright point of his mind in the back of hers fizzled into nothingness.

T'Pring's mouth opened in a silent scream as the agony of loss hit her, but it wasn't over, not over, never over…

She wasn't even that strong a telepath...she should be able to shield against it…she ought to, but she couldn't. She _couldn't_.

On the screen, the planet that had sheltered her her whole life shattered and fell in on itself, taking with it everyone and everything she knew, everyone she'd ever cherished…

And she couldn't hide from it.

Rather than raising her shields against the onslaught, she dropped them completely, reaching out as far as she could, trying to touch the low-level _presence_ of Vulcan minds that had been part of her experience for as long as she had been alive.

On the screen, the planet blinked out of existence.

T'Pring collapsed to the floor that suddenly seemed all too far away.

_No…no, no, no…_

_Why was she here? Why?_

The emptiness inside her threatened to pull her in on herself until she was nothing but a singularity herself…

"I'm sorry," a voice whispered brokenly. "I'm so sorry."

…drawing in on herself until there was nothing left…

"I hope you'll forgive me…"

…nothing left…

A hand.

A hand gently stroking her own, and T'Pring remembered to breathe.

The mind she felt through the faint link was strange and alien, and lacking the telepathic training she was used to, but it held a strength all its own.

"I'm so sorry." Gaila repeated.

"Why?"

It was all she could voice.

"I don't know, I don't know…"

Gaila moved her hand slightly, but T'Pring followed it, keeping contact—desperately, selfishly unwilling to let go.

T'Pring saw tears form in the corners of Gaila's eyes before she leaned forward and touched her forehead to T'Pring's.

Of their own accord, T'Pring's fingers rose to the side of Gaila's face.

She shouldn't…she shouldn't…she knew she shouldn't…

But every telepathic instinct she possessed was telling her to make contact, any contact, to prove she wasn't alone in the universe…

Gaila touched the back of her hand, and she tried to pull away.

"S'ok," whispered Gaila, and pressed T'Pring's hand back to her face. "It's ok."

The telepathic contact points flared to brilliant life, and the chaos around them disappeared again.

_They stood facing each other in an emptiness that seemed only natural, as neither had filled it yet._

"_Why, why, why," chanted T'Pring, in the endless litany that she couldn't voice aloud. "Why, why?" She sank to the nonexistent ground._

_Gaila shook her head and knelt down in front of her. "I don't know," she repeated. "I don't know…I don't even know what to say. If you were Orion, I would have some idea, but…what would a Vulcan say?"_

_T'Pring blinked, and marshaled as much of her mind as she could to answer the question. The more of her mind was focused on anything else, the less of it was busy forming list of things that no one would ever see again, lists of names of everyone she'd ever met, lists of lists of losses… _

"…'_I grieve with thee'," she said slowly. The words were in Vulcan in her own mind, but the meaning behind them slipped easily into Gaila's mind in whichever language she favored._

_Gaila nodded slowly. "I do grieve with thee."_

_The words slipped back to Vulcan in her mind. It helped more than it should have. If Vulcan must be mourned, this was how it should be mourned…_

"…_what would an Orion say?" Anything to maintain the distraction…_

_Gaila shook her head. "An Orion would respond more with actions."_

"_What actions, then?"_

_Gaila hesitated. "I've found it's a bad idea to use Orion customs with non-Orions in situations like this."_

_T'Pring shook her head. "Worse than this? I can't…don't want to think…"_

_Gaila hesitated again. _

"_Then don't think," she murmured, and leaned forward and kissed her._

_The lists of losses ground to a halt in T'Pring's mind._

_Gaila pulled away slightly. "If distraction's your only goal," she whispered, "then you may find that Orion customs serve you well."_

"…_I see," said T'Pring. _

_Gaila smiled softly, and bitterly. "Orion customs are very different from yours. But I could show you, if you wanted."_

_Perhaps there was value in cultural exchange. Besides, thought the darkest, bitterest part of her soul, what did Vulcan custom matter anymore?_

"_Perhaps so."_

* * *

The third time they met was on New Vulcan.

They had been rescued from the miraculously-intact section of saucer they had been trapped on, and had gone their separate ways—Gaila, reassigned to the Enterprise, and T'Pring to the newly-developed colony world.

T'Pring was taking a shift on a building team—every able-bodied citizen was helping with the building process—when she heard the voice behind her.

"Long time no see."

T'Pring turned, and Gaila grinned at her and stepped forward. Her grace still reminded T'Pring of a _le-matya_, but that thought was now a bitter one—no _le -matyas_ had survived the Immeasurable Loss.

T'Pring set down her tools to greet her properly. "Live long and prosper," she said, holding up her hand.

Gaila grinned gamely and returned the salute. "Peace and long life to you, too."

"What brings you to New Vulcan?"

"Oh, the Enterprise was making a supply run, thought I'd volunteer, see who I ran into."

T'Pring nodded. "I see."

Gaila sniffed the air. "So…taken a new bondmate?"

T'Pring's eyebrows drew together. "I thought you could always tell the difference."

Gaila shrugged. "I can smell availability. You don't smell _single_, but you don't exactly smell…_unavailable._"

Both of T'Pring's eyebrows rose.

"I…have taken a new bondmate," she admitted. "Out of necessity." There were too few women on New Vulcan for any to remain single.

"Ah," said Gaila. "I suppose continuing the species is a high priority."

T'Pring glanced away. "That it is," she agreed.

"So," said Gaila, "would it be unforgivable curiosity to ask—in the name of cultural exchange—what Vulcans tend to do when trapped in a marriage of convenience?"

T'Pring blinked, and then hesitated. "There are…different historical precedents…" She found herself grateful that there were no other Vulcans within earshot.

"Aren't there always," agreed Gaila affably. "Though I suppose I must admit a personal preference to know which ones _you're_ fond of."

"I…have been busy."

"Too busy to think about it?"

"Yes."

Gaila stepped closer. "And if circumstances forced you to think about it?"

T'Pring was silent for a moment, and then raised an eyebrow. "In that hypothetical scenario, I would of course have to put a great deal of thought into the matter."

Gaila grinned. "And in that hypothetical scenario, where would your musings lead you?"

T'Pring glanced aside. "There are cases where one or both parties would…seek other arrangements."

"Hmm. Interesting idea."

"It…is not considered a particularly Vulcan arrangement."

"Isn't it? It is a very Orion thing to do."

T'Pring looked up, and found that Gaila had dropped her gaze.

"…but then, you're not Orion," continued the red-haired woman. "And you've certainly done your part to promote cultural exchange. _I_ certainly couldn't ask more of you."

T'Pring was silent for a long moment. "I am not Orion," she agreed. "However…I have found that cultural exchange may suggest unforeseen options that turn out to be entirely logical."

Gaila glanced up again, and T'Pring made her decision.

"This may be one of those times," she said, and held out two fingers in silent offer.

Gaila's face registered shock, and then out of the shock spread thin lines of delight until her whole face cracked into joy.

"It might be at that," she said, and reached forward to join hands.


End file.
